


Rotten Meat

by horrorgremlin (catstuff)



Series: Once Bitten [8]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Car Accident, Character Study, Dismemberment, Gore, I dont mean fun noncon, Mind Control, Murder, Necrophilia, Other, Rape, Sexual Assault, Vampires, Verbal Abuse, all kinds of excessive violence, this is the big one ok. Theres a lot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-17
Updated: 2020-04-17
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:48:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23694928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/catstuff/pseuds/horrorgremlin
Summary: Everything worthwhile comes through pain, and Mariah knew she would be tested, pushed past her limits, and would somehow grit her teeth and come out the other side. This isn’t like that at all.
Series: Once Bitten [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1702981





	Rotten Meat

**Author's Note:**

> Content warnings: child predation, grooming, sexual assault, rape, dehumanization, hypnosis/mind control/brainwashing, murder, gratuitous violence, sexualized violence, gore and dismemberment, car accident, alcohol, verbal abuse, necrophilia.

**February 20th, 2019.**

The night air is crisp and cold as Mariah clomps down the front stairs of her mother’s Chicago townhouse. The solid weight of her new boots makes her feel powerful; her mom has great taste in gifts, if not much else worth mentioning. It’s eleven o’clock the night before Mariah’s eighteenth birthday, and she is dying to start this new chapter of her life.

Her Uber pulls up — not to the curb, the whole street is parked to hell — and she smooths her miniskirt under her thighs as she gets in the back. She’s already got her earbuds in, and she picks at her fishnet tights and stares down at the little car icon creeping slowly along its GPS-designated route instead of looking out the window.

She’s got no idea where she’s headed. It doesn’t matter that it’s a Wednesday night. She can drag her ass to school tomorrow even if she’s hung over as hell or still trashed or falling asleep on her feet. This is what she’s been working towards, what she’s been looking for. After tonight, things are going to be different.

Her destination turns out to be a swanky hotel. She gets out of the car without a word to the driver and heads into the lobby. The man she’s looking for loiters just inside the entrance, easy to pick out not by any particular feature but by his obvious aesthetic mismatch with the place’s posh, tidy clientele. They make eye contact and she stomps confidently up to him, like she’s got something to prove.

He plucks an unlit cigarette from his mouth and says, “You over eighteen?”

“I will be at midnight.”

He checks his analog watch and shrugs.

“Eh. Good enough.”

He gestures at her to follow and leads her to the hotel garage. After a bit of walking he pulls a set of keys from his pocket. Then he pauses and turns back to address Mariah again.

“You a virgin?”

She’s equal parts scandalized and intrigued.

“Does it _matter?_ ”

He flicks the now finished cigarette down the row of cars.

“Yes.”

She manages to maintain a poker face as she considers.

“I guess, technically.”

“Good enough,” he says again, and clicks a button on his keys. His car chirps to life near the smoldering cigarette butt. It looks as out of place among the other cars as he did in the lobby. He opens the front passenger door, so she gets inside. Then he walks around to the driver’s side and starts the engine.

Mariah clutches her small purse in her lap and discreetly tucks away her bundled earbuds between her cell phone and a miniature can of pepper spray. “Where are we going?”

“Where you wanna be, babe.” He cracks the window, lights another cigarette, and heads for the interstate. “Where the power is.”

Mariah tries to track where they’re going, but every highway looks alike and the signs go by too fast to get her bearings, so she keeps her attention on the driver and her fingers on the sharp metal keychain, shaped like a pink cat’s head, dangling from her bag’s zipper. This feels dangerous. This _is_ dangerous. The thrill is a welcome intoxication after months of scouring blogs and smoking weird herbs alone in her room. The car clock reads 12:27; in a few weeks, daylight savings time will kick back in, and it will be correct again.

A few minutes before midnight (12:52), they pull up a long dirt drive and park askew amidst a half dozen other scattered clunkers. Mariah steps out of the car and gazes up at the full moon, shivering in her scissor-torn layers and cropped jacket.

“You can leave your stuff in the car,” the man advises.

“Why?”

“Won’t need it.”

She’ll be the judge of that. At her glare, he shrugs and beckons her toward the small barn ahead of them. Mariah glances at the much cozier looking little farmhouse off to one side, holds her jacket closed over her chest, and follows the stranger.

It’s warmer inside, if not by a lot; she can still see her breath misting on every exhale. There are voices deeper in, making the distinct sounds of a group trying to hold in their rowdiness until it’s time to unleash it. She can’t see any of them, though: the view of anything beyond the entry area, filled with piles of dusty farming equipment, is obscured by free-standing fiberboard walls, seven or eight feet high.

“Take your coat off,” the man says.

“Why?”

For the first time, the man’s air of detachment cracks, and he raises his voice.

“Will you quit being so difficult? Do you want to go in or not?”

The subdued hubbub inside falls silent. Everyone is listening to see which way this will go.

Whoever they are, they have something precious enough to be worth hiding out here. Dangerous enough to be worth keeping secret from all but the initiated.

Mariah wants it.

She hangs her jacket as nonchalantly as she can. A glance at the man tells her he doesn’t care so much about her bag, for whatever reason, so she loops its thin strap back over her shoulder. Keeping her fingers hooked through the eyes of her cat keychain makes her feel more in control. She holds her head high and allows the man to tie something over her eyes.

Then he leads her in.

The voices pick back up at once, some jeering and others shushing and scolding. She hears flashes of dialogue about ceremony and patience and _‘Get on with it already!’_ and a few voices’ repeated whooping of _‘Fresh meat!’_ There’s something almost tangible now, like electricity in the air. A sharp smell, and something mildly rotten. Mariah feels herself break out in full-body goosebumps. She clenches the sharp keychain in her fist and squares her shoulders. Hazing is temporary.

She stumbles as she’s pulled faster suddenly, then half falls and half is shoved onto a waist-high platform made of what has to be stacked hay bales, because it’s jabbing her all over and itches like sin. She tries to sit up, but is pressed back down by a firm hand on the front of her shoulder. She’s shivering badly now, from fear as much as cold. The vague, sightless sense of bodies looming closer presses in on her from all directions.

A voice says something in a language that isn’t English. The rest of the voices repeat it back. For a moment, the fear is forgotten and the thrill is back — _real magic!_ — but there’s no time for any follow-up thoughts on the fine line between _initiate_ and _sacrifice_.

Everything worthwhile comes through pain, and Mariah knew she would be tested, pushed past her limits, and would somehow grit her teeth and come out the other side. This isn’t like that at all.

In quick succession, beastlike fangs gore into both of her forearms, both thighs, the top of her breast, and then her throat, and shoulder, and her hips, and... It all melts together, a grotesque and vertiginous pain that shatters her consciousness anew every instant, without reprieve. A scream bleeds from her throat, helpless and unheard, as the vital heat drains from her body into a dozen cold, waiting mouths.

-

**February 21st, 2021.**

The dorm room door has two names on it, each cutely calligraphed in thick black sharpie on its own construction-paper heart, for Valentines season: ‘Grace’ and ‘Alanna.’ Mariah knocks once and enters without waiting. Grayson looks up from his blandly-furnished bottom bunk, then checks the time on his phone.

“You’re early.”

Mariah shuts the door and shrugs off her bag onto a desk chair.

“I couldn’t wait.”

Alanna is out as usual, one of the reasons Mariah prefers Grayson’s room to her own, even though the bunked beds are kind of a pain. She ducks her head to sit down next to him, close enough that their thighs touch. Grayson brushes a stray ashy blond ringlet out of his eyes and smiles.

“I don’t mind. I already gave up on doing homework tonight, it wasn’t really working.”

“I’m _much_ more interesting,” Mariah says matter-of-factly, as if that were in question. Grayson already likes her.

“What do you want to do tonight?” Grayson asks, pulling a pillow into his lap and wrapping both arms around it. His legs kick restlessly against the side of the bed. “I have class early, but I can stay up for a while.”

“I dunno,” Mariah lies. “Kinda just wanted some girl time.”

Grayson half-smiles half-frowns half-shrugs, tightening his arms around the pillow.

“You want to watch a movie?”

“Sure.” He breathes a small sigh of relief and starts pushing his pillows up against the wall at the head of his bed to create a sitting-nook. He reaches down to pull his laptop from under the edge of the bed, then squeezes himself into the corner and starts looking for something to watch. Mariah slides in next to him, reaching over him to hijack the laptop’s trackpad, and he’s suddenly very aware of how tight a fit it is for them to sit side-by-side this way on his dorm-issued long twin.

Grayson’s so used to living with discomfort, though, that his own feelings have become invisible to him, like water to a fish.

Mariah, he noticed as soon as she came in, is wearing an incredibly low-slung pair of sweatpants with something written on the butt, and a thin-strapped camisole that makes it clear her bra is the most modest thing she has on. Somehow her bared midriff makes him feel exposed in his oversized hoodie. Halfway through the movie he wriggles out of it, mumbling something about the heat, then tentatively resettles himself. His arm presses against Mariah’s, skin to skin now below where his t-shirt sleeve ends. She feels cool to the touch.

“Hey,” he says after a second, “Are you cold? Do you want my hoodie?”

She shrugs her shoulder behind his, snuggling closer, and practically purrs, “You can keep me warm.”

Grayson doesn’t mind, exactly, but he feels obligated to set the record straight.

“Hey, um, I’m not...” He doesn’t know what he is; he doesn’t think he’s a lesbian, though.

“Uh, yeah, me neither,” says Mariah, again as if it’s the most obvious thing in the room. She nuzzles her head against his. “I just like _you_. I don’t make that many girlfriends.”

Grayson feels his face flush hot. He can’t imagine why she wouldn’t. A girl like her should have no trouble getting close to anyone she wants; it still feels like a little bit of an accident that she chose him, shy and unremarkable in every way. He keeps his face pointed at the screen and hopes she doesn’t look at him.

“You know,” Mariah continues after a few minutes of blushing cinematic limbo, speaking softly with her mouth close to Grayson’s ear, “I had fun this weekend, but there’s one thing I wanted for my birthday that I didn’t get.”

“Uh?” Grayson says, and gulps. “What’s that?”

By way of answer, she slides closer until her face is low enough to press into Grayson’s neck, and breathes in deeply, humming softly on the exhale. He can feel her lips curl into a smile. His senses are on high alert, but he can’t seem to pull his eyes away from the screen in his lap. Her lips move, cool against his hot skin, but she isn’t saying anything.

“M-Mariah?”

“Shhh.” Her arm slithers behind his back and around his waist.

Something is happening, and something about it is wrong. He voices the only clear objection that comes to mind.

“What about Fletcher?”

“Fletcher is.” Mariah sighs dramatically; the brush of air sends a chill up Grayson’s spine. “A very, very, very nice boy. He’s great. He’s a little boring, though. Easy. Predictable.” She licks a firm, deliberate line up his neck and behind his ear. He’s turning so red. It’s so cute, and _so_ tantalizing. With a real effort of will, she pulls back enough to see his face. She only has to be patient a few seconds longer.

“Gracie,” she says, and waits until he looks at her before continuing. “I want to share something with you.”

The tension in Mariah’s stare petrifies Grayson like a Medusa’s gaze. He sits there, alive and full of blood, frozen between the most alluringly terrifying person he knows and the white-painted cement-brick wall. He makes a noise that ends in a question mark.

“Can you do something for me?”

He can’t even begin to speculate on what she wants from him, but he hopes he’s up to it. “Y-yes.”

“Stay quiet.”

She feels around his neck with her lips until she finds where his pulse is strongest. With feeding, she doesn’t have to be too precise; blood is blood, and fast food is usually the safest bet. This, on the other hand, she has only one chance to get right. His breath is getting quicker, and so is the vibrant rhythm under his skin. She carefully lines up her fangs — Grayson starts to shiver when the sharp tips first brush him — and once she’s confident of her positioning, she bites.

Grayson squeals, a high noise of pain and panic from the back of his throat, but the door out to the hallway is closed and locked. He isn’t loud enough. On screen, another episode of _The Vampire Diaries_ autostarts — Mariah’s pick, and Grayson still hasn’t managed to get into it, though the banal series seems to go on forever. His whining dies down after a few seconds; maybe he’s gone back to watching it.

Even as he continues to shake, begins to hyperventilate, and intermittently emits a pathetic whining wail, Grayson doesn’t try to physically fight her off. Mariah’s body pins him into the corner, and his laptop resting on his thighs keeps him from easily fleeing to the other end of the bed. His arms are tense and half-pinned, his fingers clutching uselessly at the leg of Mariah’s sweatpants. He has no leverage.

Mariah’s head swells with power as she drinks, his blood fresh and healthy and rich with fear. Grayson’s failure to refuse or resist her at any point ought to bore her, but there’s something about his clear and utter distress combined with his failure of will that, in this case, might be even sweeter somehow. Neither of them can resist the other.

She realizes she’s starting to fill up. Maybe she shouldn’t have snacked on that TA the other day, but she hadn’t wanted to do her birthday weekend on an empty stomach. Shit. Then she feels Grayson’s grip on her leg start to fade, and a thread of relief weaves through the haze of elation. She notices that he’s crying and wraps both arms around him, pulling him closer with a tenderness divorced from the animal ferocity with which she drinks. There is no internal conflict between her power high and her instinct to comfort him. Finally, mercifully, his pitiable cries trail into quiet as he passes out.

Mariah disengages her mouth from his limp throat and licks her lips. Blood dribbles from the puncture wounds and seeps into the fabric of his t-shirt, deep, stark red on faded white. Mariah frowns and presses her fingers to his neck to stop the leak. She knows she has to complete the job all at once, because it’s either that or make a bloody mess too big to pass off as something menstrual. But she’s pretty sure the result will be the same whether it takes a few minutes or a few hours, so she‘ll take some time to sit and enjoy the final minutes of her twentieth birthday, thank you very much, instead of trying to gorge herself all at once.

The credits roll again. With her free hand, Mariah reaches for the laptop to skip a few episodes, accelerating events toward the season’s climax. Then she settles back in and gives Grayson another good sniff. He smells even better with an open wound, so much better with a stomach full of his blood sharpening her senses. Already, she’s hungry again.

She laps up the blood that’s seeped around her fingers since the first movie ended, then reattaches her lips around the puncture holes. 

She’s been massaging the wound with her fingers, preventing it from clotting properly, and it oozes steadily into her mouth. There’s no need to bite him again. She does anyway, right over the first one, and lets out a low moan of pure pleasure and satisfaction as the blood flows more easily into her mouth.

Teeth still anchored to Grayson’s limp throat, Mariah shifts to a more comfortable position, pulling his body closer with her arm still around him. Her other hand slips down the front of her sweatpants.

-

**February 21st, 2019.**

Mariah wakes up.

She thinks she’s awake. It feels like dreaming, or like moving through water under a strobe light. Her entire body aches from the core. Slowly, feeling every horrible twinge of tiny muscles the movements entail, she sits up and rips off the blindfold.

The clear, undreamlike light of dawn streams into the barn through high, glassless windows, crisscrossing the space and casting rectangular spotlights over the scene before her. In every direction but up, the predominant color is red: beet red puddles, glittering garnet where the sun meets them; deep crimson ground into the dusty dirt floor, brighter where it meets scattered bits of pale yellow hay; bodies, some nude, most whole, a few in pieces, all caked in blood like drying clay; and swirled scarlet spatters and droplets radiating outward from the epicenter of the damage like a Pollock, except that this, Mariah thinks, is _art_.

She looks down at herself. Her clothes are more shredded than they ought to be, her shirt and tights in particular. She’s still on the raised platform, and the hay beneath her is stained, too, but just here and there, nothing like the surrounding carnage. Her leather novelty purse, shaped like a little black ouija board with gold detailing, has somehow survived with the strap unbroken around her arm.

Her very, very weak arm. Last night is coming back to her in bits and flashes, and she’s doing her best to let it slide out of her memory, even as the remembered sensations rekindle deep in her bones. The space around her spins invitingly. She starts to retch, but that’s not quite right, so she stops and tries to get her bearings instead.

Her platform is in the center of the room, and the ground immediately surrounding it is strangely bare of blood. Clambering down to the floor, trembling and wobbling on the platforms of her well-laced boots, she sniffs the air. A body nearby is twitching feebly, one bicep ending in a raw fray with the rest of the arm lying far enough away that each has a separate, disconnected puddle of bloodied ground under it. Mariah gravitates toward it, sniffing more as she nears.

The detached arm is dead, but the rest of the body’s still got the smell of life to it, if not much. Reaching it, she falls to her knees. The thigh and hip on one side are half-shredded with teeth marks, but the other side is intact, and she presses her face into the soft, dirt- and blood-caked flesh. Locating the femoral artery by where the scent is strongest, she tears open the wound that’s already there and drinks. It’s the most natural thing in the world.

It’s not enough, but she does feel less dizzy. When she tries to look up at the sky to judge the hour, though, it feels like a sunburn on her retinas. Swearing and covering her eyes with her hands, she grits her teeth and waits for the pain to pass. It does. Unfortunately, none of the corpses in sight appear to have sunglasses on them, but she does find an umbrella in a bucket by where her jacket is still hanging. She takes both and ventures outside.

The man from the hotel is sitting in his car with the seat tipped back and the door open, smoking a cigarette. He’s wearing wraparound sunglasses and a dorky bucket hat. On the ground next to the car sits a canister of gasoline.

“What the hell is going on?” Mariah rasps. He isn’t looking in her direction. She clears her throat and yells, “Hey, asshole!”

The man drops his cigarette in his lap and cusses as he fumbles to retrieve it.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“You brought me here!”

He climbs out of the car and starts looking around furtively in all directions, though the flat land and bright morning sun make it clear that they’re the only ones around. Then he peers at Mariah over the top of his shades, taking in her bedraggled appearance: lipstick-kisses of dried blood around bite wounds that have started to shrink and repair themselves; the wet blood around her own mouth; her squint from under the brim of a blue umbrella that she clutches like a lifeline.

Shaking his head, he drops his cigarette butt and stubs it out with the toe of his shoe.

“Shit.”

“You didn’t think it was worth mentioning beforehand I’d be paying with my _life?_ ” Mariah demands. “Do you know how much that fucking hurt?” She can hardly stand it now, queasy as her body recalls the sensation of being sucked dry from all sides, head aching from the sun, the full picture coming together in her mind, and face to face with this negligent ignoramus.

“Would you have come with me if I’d told you?”

Yes. Maybe. She’s desperate to think that she still would have gotten in his car, still would have walked sightless to the altar of her death with her head held high. She wanted this! She wasn’t afraid! But a part of her knows that she can never know for sure, and the idea that she might have chickened out disgusts her.

Instead she asks, “Where’s everyone else?”

“Gone.” He lights another cigarette. “And damn lucky, for both of us. You’re not supposed to be here.”

“Again, _you_ brought me here!”

“You’re not supposed to be _walking around_ ,” he finally clarifies, gesticulating in frustration. “It’s this whole stupid tradition. We get a virgin to eat first, all together, and then the reason it’s a ‘sacrifice—’” his air quotes come with an eye roll— “is you leave her there in the middle of everything and don’t touch her. Some bullshit about self-control and the ‘sanctity of blood.’ But you don’t get to play with her and you _definitely_ don’t get to _turn_ her. I don’t even know what kind of trouble I’d get in. Who the fuck got their blood on you?”

He’s talking to himself at this point, leaving Mariah to gape, incredulous.

“So you were going to just leave me for dead?”

“And burn you with the rest of them.”

“How fucking dare you—“

“Jesus Christ, kid,” the man says, with no apparent sense of irony; this guy should be a goddamn stand-up comedian. He takes a long drag on his cigarette. Mariah’s legs are starting to smoke faintly where the gashes in her tights bare her skin. “Listen. Someone made a mistake. Doesn’t fucking matter who, now. Am I gonna throw you back in that barn? Or can you get the hell out of here, keep your mouth shut, and not cause trouble?”

A strange sense of calm envelops her. She can feel her heart beating in her chest, different than before, a weak but remarkably consistent flutter — and she knows how to make it stronger.

“Can I have a ride back into the city?”

The vampire smokes in silence for a good minute or two while Mariah waits, spinning the blue umbrella, cocked now at a sharp angle to protect her legs.

“I’ll drop you at the end of an off-ramp. And I’ll never see you again.”

“Here’s hoping,” Mariah replies just as curtly.

He walks the barn’s wreckage like a labyrinth, hefting the gasoline can as he goes — Mariah thinks it’s a bit of a shame, destroying all that beauty and effort, but she sees the practicality — then, standing back from the entrance, he tosses his cigarette butt into the shiny trail that leads into the building. It all goes up so easily.

They don’t talk on the drive back to Chicago. It’s too late in the morning for it to feel worth going to school. The brightness of the day masks its frigid temperature, and the sun burns Mariah’s eyes. She stares directly into it.

-

**Circa 2025-26.**

It takes Mariah only 29 hours to drive from Chicago, Illinois to Portland, Oregon. Vampires don’t need sleep, right? Grabbing a snack from a rest stop patron here and there keeps her energy up, and also protects her eyes and skin from the sun. The daylight leg of the trip is still far too bright for comfort, but she’s glad to put the miles between herself and her hometown. She’s always loved Chicago, but right now it’s blanketed by a heady, screaming fog of unpleasant memories, and a girl can only take so much.

She turns on her GPS only after getting off the highway in Portland, and it guides her to a sad-looking old Blockbuster in Eugene. It sure doesn’t look like a party venue; the parking lot is tiny and half-empty. She’s here, though, and the address matches, so she stretches, fixes her dress, and checks her makeup in the car’s side mirror.

As she click-clacks across the lot, she finally notices the doorman, dressed in a legitimate tuxedo and a cape that avoids looking _totally_ comical only by the superb quality of its construction and fabrics. Careful not to laugh, Mariah gives the man a neutral nod. He looks her over and nods her inside. She barely makes it past him before cracking a disparaging smile.

Inside, Mariah is relieved to find that the guy in the cape was not an omen of full-blown ironic pastiche, and she’s neither overdressed nor out of place in her glittering, slinky golden slip of a dress and four-inch heels. Despite the dearth of cars in the lot, there are something like forty or fifty vampires here, adorned in everything from eveningwear to underwear.

Any walls that might have once been inside the Blockbuster have been knocked down, making the space feel much larger than the building’s exterior suggests. Every door and window is hung with heavy blackout curtains, and every wall with black silk sheets and blue string lights, casting an eerie reflection on the shiny fabric. The effect is just shy of otherworldly, a dark sea of glossy gleams.

Tables of different sizes and materials, all solid and shiny and visibly reinforced, are artfully arranged within the space, each in its own halo of light, and atop each are two or three or four human bodies in varying states of duress, destruction, and collapse. Over here, two cling to each other, screaming and crying, as a quintet of vampires feeds from both of them. Over there, a vampire wearing expensive-looking underwear and a leather harness stands atop a low, wide table, kicking around a trembling, well-bruised body like a cat with a mouse and a vendetta. A crowd has gathered, cheering and egging on the assault.

On a high table no bigger across than a tire, in easy view from the entryway, a single body stands unsteadily, hands suspended over its head by a cord from the ceiling. Three lights mounted above, convening inward from different angles, highlight the intricate geometric patterns carved into its skin. Blood drips down from a thousand clean-gouged stripes, nearly obscuring the design below the knees, and the runoff trickles into a wide basin below the table. A sign indicates not to disturb the artwork.

The sounds and sights all coalesce together into a violent, discordant symphony, and Mariah feels more at home than she has in years. She looks around for a relatively fresh body, a table with an open seat, anything to throw herself at. In a back corner, a pile of bound and gagged bodies, their skin unmarred, is guarded by a vamp with the distinct air of a bouncer. Mariah plucks a flute of champagne from a tray and joins the queue behind him, all watching as they wait their turns.

It’s only when she runs out of active scenes to observe that she notices the table in the center of the room, the only one draped in cloth, which for some unholy reason is glistening white. It’s not roped off, but everyone keeps a wide berth around it as if it were. Laid atop it is a girl — a young woman — collapsed with her back arched in futile resistance, her limbs splayed and her clean blonde hair somehow unsullied. Like Mariah did, she wears a blindfold, but unlike Mariah, she won’t be getting back up. Her nude body shows a healthy amount of bruising at her wrists and ankles, and an orderly series of mouth-shaped gouges down its length.

Mariah narrows her eyes. Serves the little fool right for sticking her nose where it didn’t belong. She turns away and sips her champagne.

Scenes and feeds end and new ones begin, the line moves, and Mariah finds herself before a broad coffee table with two trembling humans and two other vampires. The humans are easily hefted up, where they stand back to back in the middle, as if it will save them. One of the other vampires, the one she saw before with the harness and the lingerie, aims a well-placed kick at an ankle and they both come tumbling down.

The other vamp, dressed in a pair of spandex exercise shorts that showcase his growing erection, grabs a body and slams it down by the shoulders, laughing as it wails through its gag. “Little bitch, haven’t even bitten you yet,” he crows, holding it to the table with one hand around its throat, clearly reveling in its look of wild panic.

With no flair or preamble, Harness hauls the other body to her mouth and goes straight for the neck, taking thick, greedy gulps. The body emits a skittering screech, muffled and nasal. It doesn’t last long before shuddering and going limp, head lolling to the side.

Harness drops it and wipes her mouth.

“Sorry,” she says. “I worked up a hell of an appetite. It just passed out, it’ll come to soon.”

Spandex looks at Mariah, who has been watching, awestruck or dumbfounded.

“Come on, baby, first time? Don’t be shy.”

Mariah sneers. Harness elbows Spandex and murmurs, “Don’t be a dick,” but his taunt has already worked. He grins as Mariah shoves him aside and grabs the body by the throat herself. She looks down at it: one leg hanging off the table, dark eyes as wide as a doe’s, wadded-up rags duct-taped into its mouth. The poor little thing is sobbing, useless tears salting its skin. All she feels is disgust. No, disgust and hunger, and... There’s more, but hunger is a place to start.

She puts one knee up on the coffee table, bends down, and bites into the meat of the body’s shoulder. Then Spandex grabs its errant leg, restraining the limb through desperate, jerking attempts to kick him off, and bites it high on the inner thigh, resting his face comfortably in the hinge between leg and pelvis and grunting with pleasure. Mariah drinks until the full-bodied glory of a fresh blood high washes through her, then pulls back, licking her lips. Spandex is still drinking, and the body is shrieking now at a pitch beyond what cotton gags can effectively dampen. Mariah pushes her palm steadily down against its windpipe until the irritating sound changes to a quiet rasp for air, and keeps it there until Spandex is done.

Harness laughs appreciatively, giving them a few quiet claps of applause. When Spandex lets it go, the body whimpers and tries to roll away from the edge of the table; Harness rewards it with a sharp kick to the spine, pushing it over onto its stomach and knocking the wind out of it. She climbs onto the table, then straddles its hips, trapping its legs between her muscular thighs, and bites deep into the crook of its neck. Mariah flushes and Spandex whoops politely as she rocks her hips slowly back and forth against its ass, making more bite wounds and letting things get a little sloppy, blood streaking her mouth and cheek and spilling onto the table as she begins to moan.

The body clenches its eyes shut, willing itself elsewhere, crying quiet tears of defeat. Spandex continues to cheer. Mariah glances around the room and is confused to find no one looking over her shoulder. Then it hits her: this is _okay_. This is _allowed_ here.

The realization delivers a rush of strength and vindication like a tidal wave. Emboldened, Mariah strides around to the other side of the table, where the second body is still unconscious. She slaps it across the face, then again, harder, when it doesn’t wake up right away. Groggily it comes to.

“Hey,” she croons. “You up, baby?”

It hasn’t remembered where it is yet. She waits and watches it take in first the ambient sounds of torture and bacchanal, then its own nudity and powerlessness, and then the awful totality of its predicament as its attempt to scream comes out muted by layers of cloth and tape. She loves these moments most of all, she thinks, and bites hard beneath its clavicle, where she can feel the frantic beating of its stupid mortal heart, self-sabotaging in its attempt to circulate vital oxygen faster. It pulses like a drum against Mariah’s tongue and it feels as if it’s beating inside her mouth, squeezing fresh blood down her throat like hot honey. The body’s muted scream, a harmonizing note, reverberates pleasantly against her skull.

Mariah sucks the wound one more time and lets it go with a wet _pop_ , excess blood dribbling out and down the body’s chest and stomach. Then she climbs onto the table. This one’s a little bigger than her, but it’s in no state to put up a fight, physically or psychologically. She hikes up her skirt before straddling its lap, shoving it easily down on its back. Then she pauses to pull down the top of her dress, baring her breasts with the smug confidence of an exhibitionist.

The two human bodies on the table are parallel now, one face up and one face down with their heads at opposite ends. Mariah has a dim peripheral awareness of Spandex going _hot damn_ and Harness scraping her teeth down the other plaything’s spine — but she’s focused on her own prey now. It’s time to steal the show.

Cupping its jaw in both hands, Mariah coaxes the body beneath her back up into a sitting position. She pulls its face close, forcing it to lock eyes with her, and whispers a few words, then lets it go. It falls quiet, then haltingly, in a series of mechanical jerks, raises its hands to Mariah’s waist, steadying her as she shifts her position in its lap, She reaches a hand down. A deep flush rises up its throat and cheeks, its breath catching as she nibbles a series of sharp, shallow bites behind its ear, its hands quaking as they make their way onto her breasts, her hand working between their bodies.

She whispers again, into its ear, and it shakes its head, struggling to keep quiet as tears swell in its eyes. She shifts again, and with a couple tries and a very specific, well-practiced angled scoop of the hips, forces a sudden moan out of each of them. She smiles against the side of its face and murmurs words of praise. Then — probably a bit unorthodox, but she’s feeling fucking amazing — she rips the tape from its face and presses their mouths together, slicing up its lower lip and drinking up the sweet little rivulets. Suddenly she wonders what would happen if she bit off its tongue, how much it would bleed, what sound it would make.

She glances to the other vamps at the table — this idea would be utterly wasted without an audience — but her eyes, seemingly of their own accord, instead find a clear line of sight between the other tables to the meat bouncer across the room. Someone is just joining the line, tall and out of place in an open zip-up hoodie, with unkempt dark hair that reflects blue-black in the light. The figure raises a hand to clutch nervously at the opposite forearm, and the gesture is oddly familiar to her.

Mariah’s world grinds to a halt, flash-frozen in the amber of memory. She knows that hand, she’s seen it perform that movement possibly hundreds of times, she remembers what it feels like in her own. He isn’t looking at her, but she’s suddenly terrified he will. She doesn’t even want to think his name.

The living canvas near the entrance teeters on its barstool of a table, ghastly pale and somehow still bleeding. Struggling with no comfortable way to shift its weight, it lets out a shuddering bleat-like moan, mouth left ungagged as part of the performance, eyes open but seeing nothing. The body underneath Mariah is hot and wet and not yet dying, and it paws clumsily at her erect nipples, oozing fear with its tongue trapped between her teeth. A single spotlight shines down on the white-clothed table and the angelic, broken girl, not a drop of blood to mar her or disturb her peace. Harness’s vocalizations escalate into a crescendo.

Mariah reels back and shoves the body away, disgusted with it and with herself, backing down onto the floor and hurriedly fixing her dress to cover herself. Harness is in her own world; Spandex tries to ask what’s wrong, but Mariah is listening to the crackle of flames, the crush of impacted metal, words she’s tried to forget in a voice she can’t shake. The only time she ever heard him yell — _“What did you do to me?!”_ — every tentative _“Are you sure?”_ that she made fun of or ignored — the way he used to say her name, his eyes overflowing with adoration. The last thing he said to her, and how it feels like just as much of a stab in the gut now as it did back then.

She backs away toward the door, tripping over herself in her heels and haste as she swivels to run, before he can see her, and she doesn’t dare blink until she’s out the door and in the car and on the highway back to Chicago. Music blares from the open windows, almost loud enough to drown out her thoughts before the wind whips them away into nothingness.

-

**February 21st, 2022.**

“Come on, it’s my birthday,” Mariah croons into Fletcher’s ear, and plants a slightly sloppy kiss on his lips.

“Not until midnight,” he points out. “How do you know they’ll sell to you before then?”

“They’ll sell to me.” She says it as a matter of fact, and he believes her. He’s pretty sure they shouldn’t, technically, until she’s actually 21. She could easily ask him to buy it again. But a lot that shouldn’t happen, around Mariah, finds its way to life nonetheless. She’s sitting sideways in his lap, leaning into him with an arm around his shoulders, tipsy and bossing everyone around and endlessly charming.

He pats her thigh twice, a signal, and she rises to her feet, barely stumbling on the uneven forest floor. He puts an arm around her waist, half to help her balance and half out of limerence — they’ve been a couple for over a year, and they still can’t keep their hands off each other.

“You okay to drive?” Samar asks, stirring the group’s little fire with a long stick.

“It’s a dirt road,” Mariah protests, squinting down at em and Grayson, who turns back to the fire without speaking. The February woods feel sparse, bare limbs and conifers washed out by the waning moon, and the vivid light of the fire below casts each of their faces in unnatural shadows: a kid raising a flashlight to their chin to tell a scary story.

“It’s been like an hour since my last beer,” Fletcher answers, somewhat more reasonably. “I’m good.” Phone held aloft as a flashlight, he walks with Mariah back to the edge of the woods, where his dependable old SUV is parked in a pullover area by the side of the long, unlit road. He opens the passenger door to help her in first, then takes the driver’s seat and flips on the headlights.

“Go to the liquor store,” Mariah directs as he pulls onto the road, “not the gas station.”

“Sure.”

The liquor store is a fifteen minute drive from their makeshift campsite, but it has a better selection. Their held hands rest on the center console, and she toys idly with his fingers. She tries flipping on the radio, but it’s too warbled by static to be any good. She rolls her window down, but Fletcher goes _seriously?_ so she rolls it back up and pouts.

“You’re no fun.”

“Mariah, it’s winter.” He’s more amused than annoyed. She never seems that bothered by the cold.

“I’m bored,” she whines, taking his hand again, bending and unbending his fingers.

“Look through the CDs,” he suggests, which makes her laugh; she forgot that Fletcher still keeps a zippered binder of compact disc albums in his car, which isn’t cool-retro any more, just dated.

She pushes the sleeve of his coat up to poke at a scabbed-over scrape on his wrist, acquired last week while kicking a soccer ball around a weedy lot. Mariah had been braiding Grayson’s hair on the sideline, ignoring the game, but when she heard Fletcher fall she had watched from afar as Samar checked his scrapes. Ruby-red pearls of blood had bloomed through a layer of gravel stuck to his skin, the only bright thing reflecting the wan winter sunlight, and her mouth had watered.

She wants to peel the scab off so fucking bad. Instead she leans over, nuzzling into his shoulder. Then she starts kissing his neck.

“Mariah,” he says, not displeased so much as distracted, “I’m driving.”

“There’s nobody around.”

“Do you want me to pull over?” Fletcher’s voice is strained, his attention torn between the road and his girlfriend’s hand sliding up his thigh.

“No,” Mariah answers, undoing the fly of his jeans. “Keep driving.” His long legs leave plenty of room for her to lower her head between his stomach and the steering wheel.

He makes a confused noise that includes most of the word ‘dangerous.’ On a rural road like this — lined only by trees and telephone wires, nothing to see but headlights on packed dirt — it’s easy to feel like they’re the only people in the world, like there’s nothing but the woods and the utter darkness that exists only where light pollution doesn’t touch. It’s beautiful, and haunting, and romantic, and his foot is on the gas, and he’s starting to get tunnel vision.

Then Mariah’s mouth closes, warm and wet, around his cock, and his world recedes to a single point. The wheel, the car, the road, everything between the perfect darkness and the encompassing, _dangerous_ sensation occurring in his lap falls away.

“Stop,” he says weakly through the haze of sensory bliss, clinging to a shred of responsibility like a lifesaver. She responds by increasing her efforts.

There’s the doppler sound of another vehicle, a hazy moment of reaction, and a jerk and utter, instant chaos — and then it really is just Fletcher and the darkness.

He comes to groggily, unsure what he’s looking at until the stars slowly come into focus. His ears ring and his head pounds. There’s a bright glare — he turns his head and sees his SUV on its side, the headlights pointed in his general direction. One of the side mirrors, snapped off and half-shattered, is near and intact enough for him to catch a nonsensical glimpse of spilled blood and at least one limb, wearing his clothes, that’s not the shape it should be. Besides his aching head, he can’t feel anything except an odd mixture of full-on panic and utter stillness.

A warped door snaps off its hinges, and Mariah climbs up out of the side of the SUV as if emerging from the hatch of a submarine. At the sight of him, she bursts into laughter.

“Jesus Christ,” she says, “ _that_ was a rush.” Smoke billows up from the hood as she leaps to the ground. “But you’re a mess, buddy.” She ambles over and kicks him, at least he thinks she does, he can’t feel the impact.

Struggling to move at all, he turns his head again to crane up at her from the ground. She’s backlit by the headlights, and Fletcher can’t make out any details of her face, sparing him her predatory smile. All he can see clearly is her boots. His attention weaves in and out of focus.

“Can you not get up?” Mariah asks, giving him another ungentle kick. Unused to dealing with mortal injuries, she circles his body slowly, taking stock of his crumpled limbs and battered flesh and the pool of blood around him.

“Dude, are you fucking dying?”

Behind her there’s the _bang_ of a small explosion, and flames start to lick up the front of the car from the engine.

Fletcher is dimly aware that he needs help. _Ambulance,_ he tries to say, managing only a raspy croak, but it’s too late for that now — he’s not going to live through this. Mariah comes back into his line of sight and sinks to her knees.

“Alright, you big baby,” she says, and leans closer into his frame of vision as if to kiss him. “Let me fix this.”

Instead of aiming for his lips, she angles down and to the side, biting decisively into the soft meat above his collarbone. He thinks he tries to scream; Mariah doesn’t notice. She’s only moderately practiced, still, and doesn’t quite nail the placement for maximally efficient bleed. But it’s pretty good. And he’s healthy, in fantastic shape; there’s absolutely no sense letting the dirt get all that good blood.

The real waste here, she muses as she drinks, is all the times she’s restrained herself with him in the past, never letting herself drink too much from him at once, making sure to keep this sweet, boring boy in good health, to sneak small enough nips that she could always wash it cleanly from his memory with a whisper in his ear — and for what? To have him splatter across the road like a bug on a windshield, too shredded and broken to keep his good parts on the inside?

She rears up suddenly, snarling and spitting droplets of Fletcher’s blood back at him.

“You know, actually, this is bullshit,” she announces as he teeters on the edge of comprehension. Seeing his head lilt away, she slaps him across the face to keep his attention.

“I have to save your fucking life, and you’re still gonna get all pissed about it, aren’t you? Like _she_ did.” She spits the pronoun out like an insect that’s flown into her mouth. Mariah hadn’t realized just how much she’d been using her little vampire trick on Grayson, until she broke the spell by turning him and it all came crashing down at once. This time, at least she knows to expect it, she can brace herself for it, but that doesn’t stop the year-old wound of Grayson’s sudden 180 and all the changes in their friendship from burning back up through her guts, like the birth of the crackling flame beginning to eat away at the SUV, stoking her anger as the bittersweet high of Fletcher’s last batch of home brew sets in.

The thought of going through that again, with Fletcher now, is intolerable — but unavoidable. It doesn’t change what she has to do.

“Fuck. Fuck you,” she roars, slapping him again, then hauling him into her lap to continue feeding.

Eventually, Mariah’s pretty sure that she’s gotten all the blood out. She has no idea at what point he loses consciousness, and it’s not always clear cut at what point a life ends, but somewhere in there both fell away. What remains is a husk, barely recognizable as its former self. She throws him to the ground and stands up, wiping her hands clean on her thighs. Then she screams a few more expletives into the night, kicking the body again and getting a satisfying _crack_.

And then she pulls herself together, because they can’t stay here in the middle of the road. With the last of Fletcher’s life coursing through her veins, it isn’t too hard to heft his dead weight — the unintentional pun makes her laugh, but only a little — over her shoulder. She checks that she isn’t missing any pieces before taking him deeper into the woods, away from the car with the fire and the smoke, away from town, away from the campsite where the others are waiting.

Finally, she settles on a spot, and drops him without ceremony before thinking better of herself. She does her best to realign his broken bones in the dark — she’s no doctor, but decent night vision has to be worth something here, right? — because she isn’t sure if they’ll heal all zigzaggy if she doesn’t. Honestly, she isn’t completely sure they’ll heal, period. But hey, it’s a fresh injury, right, let’s not rush to pessimistic expectations.

Leaning down one more time, she bites hard into her own tongue, then quickly presses her mouth to Fletcher’s dry lips and frenches him gratuitously, to make sure the magic ingredient gets mixed all the way in.

She considers leaving him to wake up on his own, but where would she go? She waits.

-

**Circa 2025-26.**

It’s dawn in Chicago when Mariah finally double-parks her stolen car and stumbles out onto the pavement, stiff and irritable after driving from Oregon without stopping for anything but gas, and then only barely. She’s wearing a pullover sweatshirt she found in the car’s backseat from a college she didn’t get into, hood yanked down to shield her paranoid eyes from the hyperrealness of the morning light.

Ignoring traffic and causing a chain reaction of highly unpleasant honks, she crosses the street, still wearing the strappy heels she put on literal days ago for that fiasco of a soirée. As an afterthought, she locks the car with a press of a button, then shrugs and drops the keys on the sidewalk before ducking into the shithole bar where Samar is waiting.

E looks up from the counter and eir eyes go wide.

“Mariah,” e hisses under eir breath.

“Nice to see you too, jackass,” she glowers.

“Go wash your face,” Samar hisses through eir teeth.

“What?”

Mariah looks to the person behind the bar, who meets her eyes for a moment before awkwardly dropping their gaze.

Samar simplifies: “ _Bathroom._ ” E points toward the sign at the back.

Mariah is very glad that the bathroom is single occupancy with a good lock, because she isn’t prepared for what she sees in the mirror. Her eyes are cast in stark shadow, and the rest of her face, lit bright by a cruel fluorescent fixture, is a crime scene. She hasn’t eaten since the party, so the blood still caked around her mouth belongs to the two people from the table — _not people_ , she reminds herself, an assertion as cracked and flaky as their blood on her face — and the majority of it, most likely, is from the big one she’d been — did she ever, do that, with —

She chances a look into her own eyes, pulling back her hood as if in a trance. They’re bloodshot, and more swollen than she’d like to admit, and much more afraid than she’s prepared to accept. Unwelcome images superposition themselves over her reflection in her mind, different times and rooms and people and mirrors showing that same look in her eyes, the thing in the world she’s most afraid to name. It comes after every major failure like calm after a storm, every time she _realizes what she’s done._

She takes the hoodie off, drinks some cold water from the tap, and gets to cleaning herself up.

Mariah rejoins Samar at the bar fifteen minutes after arriving, the hoodie back on to cover her stained dress, but with the hood down and her makeup retouched. Samar is staring down into a cup of coffee, letting the steam billow right into eir face, its calm drift at odds with eir tight fist around eir cell phone. E waits for her to settle in before looking up, and has no reaction to her appearance, which is an improvement.

“Thanks for the, uh... input,” Mariah says, a stiff attempt to open the conversation.

“You’re lucky this place is supernatural owned and run.”

“Why do you think I picked it?”

“You’re lucky there were no human patrons in here when you came in.”

“Please, in a bar at the actual crack of dawn?” She does a double take at Samar’s mug. “Do they even serve coffee?” She looks up and calls to the barkeep at the opposite end of the counter, “Hey, can I get one of these?”

Samar takes a deep breath of coffee steam.

“You don’t have _any_ limits, do you?” E speaks at a natural volume, but doesn’t look up from the mug; e might as well be talking to emself.

Her head snaps back toward em. “Fuck are you talking about? You didn’t _have_ to meet me.”

“No.” Samar picks up the mug and takes a slow, melodramatic sip. “I didn’t.”

“Whatever. So, this party...”

Mariah’s eyes unfocus toward the shelves of liquor on the wall behind the bar. The barkeep returns and places a mug of coffee in front of her. She doesn’t acknowledge them.

“It was pretty cool at first? They really went all out. There were...” She trails off, struggling to gauge how much detail she ought to reveal to Samar. E’s not into the natural predator, top of the food chain thing, like she is, and e can get a bit judgy, to put it lightly. “There was a lot to do,” she settles on. “But apparently they let just _anybody_ in —“

“They let you in,” Samar says neutrally.

Mariah gives em a _‘what the fuck does that have to do with anything?’_ look.

“I mean they didn’t have a _dress code_ ,” she clarifies. “Or a, a guest list, or a Facebook page or anything. Any old vampire off the street could have walked right in, _any_ vampire.”

She stops then, tongue caught in a knot as she gropes aimlessly for the point she’s trying to make.

“Vampires just aren’t, fucking organized. And then when we are, it’s all just a big game of immortal Russian roulette, everyone goes home at the end and then they do the same thing next week...”

Samar sighs in audible frustration. “What’s your point?”

“What is your goddamn problem with me?” Mariah realizes she’s raised her voice when her question is followed by a thick, humid silence. She dials it back and hisses, “I didn’t ask for this. I’m just trying to survive and keep my shit together, like everyone else.”

Samar shakes eir head. “None of us asked for this, Mariah.” There’s the slightest edge of bitterness in eir voice, but the statement is mostly just factual.

“Can you be on my side for just a fucking second here?”

“You don’t _have_ a side.” E looks up now, meeting Mariah’s barely-restrained fanaticism with a dark, stony gaze that could stop a truck. “ _People_ are violent. Vampires and humans. You’ll blame anything you can instead of looking at yourself. I’ve tried —” Mariah tries to interrupt em then, but e presses on, and for once she’s stunned into silence. “I’ve _tried_ to help. I want you to do better. But I’m so sick of enabling and excusing your bullshit.”

Mariah looks completely taken aback, as if she’s never heard a word about her so-called bullshit before today. She opens her mouth, certain she’s at least entitled to a chance to defend herself. Samar doesn’t give her one.

“No. Whatever you want to say, no. You’re just a shitty fucking person, Mariah.” E rises from the barstool, shoulders relaxed, gaze cool. “You’ve never really tried to be anything else. And I’m done playing shoulder angel for you.”

Samar turns and walks out of the bar, leaving eir coffee still steaming on the counter.


End file.
